Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 2009
2009 was the year Hilary Mantel published Wolf Hall and changed what historical fiction was understood to be capable of. It was the year Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for a linked story collection about a difficult woman in a small Maine town, and Colum McCann won the National Book Award for a novel that connected a dozen lives through a single act of aerial theatre. Lorrie Moore returned after fifteen years away from the novel. Barbara Kingsolver wrote her most ambitious book. It was a year in which the novel was doing what it does best — giving full weight to lives that do not otherwise get it.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Published 2009
Wolf Hall
Thomas Cromwell rises from blacksmith’s son to the most powerful man in England, navigating the court of Henry VIII through a combination of intelligence, patience, and a willingness to understand people that most of those around him mistake for sympathy. Mantel narrates in the second person present tense — “you” are Cromwell — an unusual choice that creates an intimacy with a man whose inner life history has largely left blank. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and was the first volume of a trilogy that Mantel would complete over the following decade. She went on to win the Booker again for the second volume, Bring Up the Bodies, in 2012.
What Mantel did with the present tense and the second person is more than a formal trick. Cromwell’s worldview — pragmatic, unsentimental, attentive to what people actually want rather than what they say they want — becomes the lens through which the reader sees the entire court. His intelligence is not separate from his ethics; it is identical with them. The result is one of the most fully inhabited historical perspectives in fiction, and the reason the novel is as relevant to anyone who works in organisations as it is to readers of historical fiction.
Olive Kitteridge
Thirteen linked stories set in the small Maine town of Crosby. Olive, a retired schoolteacher, appears in each of them — sometimes at the centre, sometimes at the edge, sometimes only mentioned in passing by characters whose lives she has briefly entered and departed. She is difficult, unsentimental, frequently wrong, and more complex than anyone around her fully understands. Strout wrote the book over many years, publishing individual stories before assembling them into a whole. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009 and was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries.
The linked story collection is a form that allows a novelist to approach a character obliquely — to show what she looks like from inside, from outside, from the perspective of people who barely know her and people who have known her for decades. Strout uses this structure to build a portrait of a woman who contains more than any single story could hold. What makes Olive extraordinary is that her difficulty is not softened and her complexity is not explained. She simply is what she is, and the reader has to do the work of understanding her.
Let the Great World Spin
On the morning of August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit walked a wire strung between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. McCann uses this single act — illegal, extraordinary, watched by hundreds of people below — to connect a dozen different lives in New York City: a Irish monk working with prostitutes in the Bronx, a judge in his Park Avenue apartment, a group of mothers in a grief support group, a young woman trying to survive. Each chapter inhabits a different voice. The novel won the National Book Award in 2009.
McCann is one of the most technically accomplished structural novelists working in English. The wire walk is the still point around which a city in motion reveals itself — and the novel understands that the event is both frivolous and profound simultaneously, which is what makes it the right centre for a book about how random connection shapes a life. The chapter told from the perspective of the tightrope walker himself is the finest piece of writing in the book, and one of the finest single chapters in recent American fiction.
A Gate at the Stairs
Tassie Keltjin is a twenty-year-old college student in a Midwestern university town who takes a job babysitting for a couple — a restaurant owner and her husband — who are in the process of adopting a mixed-race child. The novel is set in the months after 9/11 and is about race, adoption, grief, and the specific kind of not-knowing that characterises early adulthood. It was Lorrie Moore’s first novel in fifteen years, and it arrived with the compression and sentence-level precision of her short fiction applied to a longer form.
Moore’s prose has a quality that is difficult to describe without quoting it: a combination of wit, grief, and absolute precision about the way language both reveals and protects the people who use it. A Gate at the Stairs is a novel about what young people do not yet know they are part of — the larger histories of race and loss and national trauma that are shaping their lives in ways they cannot yet see. The ending is one of the most devastating in recent fiction, and entirely earned.
The Lacuna
Harrison William Shepherd grows up between Mexico and the United States, works as a cook in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and becomes briefly the secretary to Leon Trotsky during his Mexican exile. He then returns to the United States, becomes a successful novelist, and is destroyed by McCarthyism. The novel is told through journals, letters, and newspaper clippings — a documentary structure that allows Kingsolver to place her fictional protagonist inside a history that is entirely real. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010.
The lacuna of the title is the gap — the silence between what happened and what the record says happened, between who a person is and who the newspapers say they are. Kingsolver is writing about the relationship between private life and public narrative, and the specific American version of that relationship in which the public narrative has the power to destroy the private life entirely. The sections set in Rivera and Kahlo’s household are the most vivid historical fiction she has written.
Half the Sky
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn spent years reporting on the oppression of women in the developing world — sex trafficking, maternal mortality, educational exclusion, gender-based violence — and wrote a book that makes the case, in specific and documented detail, that the central moral challenge of the twenty-first century is the treatment of women and girls. They do not write abstractly. Each chapter follows individual women whose stories carry the argument. The title comes from the Chinese proverb that women hold up half the sky.
This is the kind of journalism that requires years of access and the willingness to sit with extremely difficult material. Kristof and WuDunn are not naive about the complexity of what they are describing — they are interested in what works, what fails, and why, which makes the book more useful and more honest than most advocacy writing. It is the book I recommend most often to people who want to understand the structural position of women globally and what genuine change looks like at ground level.
How to navigate this list
If you want the most formally accomplished novel
→ Read Wolf Hall. It is long and requires attention, but it is one of the finest historical novels written in English in the past fifty years.
If you want the most emotionally resonant read
→ Olive Kitteridge. Strout builds a portrait of a difficult woman across thirteen stories and makes you understand her completely without ever making her easy.
If you want the best nonfiction
→ Half the Sky — rigorous, reported, and impossible to put down despite being about material that is genuinely hard to read.
If you want a novel that connects many lives through a single event
→ Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann — a wire walk above Manhattan in 1974 that becomes a lens for an entire city.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2009
What were the best books published in 2009?
The most acclaimed books of 2009 include Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Booker Prize winner), Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Pulitzer Prize winner), Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (National Book Award winner), The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, and A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. It was a particularly strong year for literary fiction written by women.
What book won the Booker Prize in 2009?
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. It was the first volume of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. She went on to win the Booker again in 2012 for Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume, making her the first woman and the first author to win the prize twice.
Is Wolf Hall a good starting point for historical fiction?
Yes — though it is not a light read. Wolf Hall is one of the finest historical novels of the twenty-first century, written in the present tense from Cromwell’s point of view using the second person “he,” which creates an unusual intimacy with a historical figure whose inner life is otherwise largely unrecorded. Read it slowly. It rewards close attention and repays rereading.
What is Olive Kitteridge about?
Olive Kitteridge is a linked story collection by Elizabeth Strout set in the small Maine town of Crosby. Olive, a retired schoolteacher, appears in each story in different capacities. She is difficult, unsentimental, and more complex than anyone around her fully understands. Strout uses the linked collection structure to approach Olive from many angles simultaneously, building a portrait that no single story could contain. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand.
What is Let the Great World Spin about?
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann connects multiple lives in New York City through Philippe Petit’s 1974 illegal wire walk between the Twin Towers. The novel follows an Irish monk in the Bronx, a Park Avenue judge, a group of mothers in a grief support group, and others whose lives intersect on a single morning. It won the National Book Award in 2009 and is structured as a series of interconnected novellas, each inhabiting a different voice and perspective.
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